Not too long ago, I wrote a post about Picnik - A Cool Free Tool to Edit Your Online Pictures. At the time, Picnik was allowing users to try out their premium tools for free. I just got an update from Picnik and they have officially launched their premium tools so they are not free anymore, but they are reasonable for the features you get and very much in line with the charges that most online Web 2.0 tools have if you want to upgrade beyond their basic services.

They charge $24.95 per year for the premium package. As a sample comparison, Flickr also charges $24.95 per year if you want to show more than 200 pictures. As a matter of fact, most of the ‘free’ web 2.0 tools have a charge beyond their basic services, which are probably not adequate if you really use them. I have a post in the works about some of the “hidden” costs of “free” web 2.0 tools. (stay tuned)

In any case, Picnik is a very nice online picture editing tool with lots of neat features for free and many more advanced editing features for a very reasonable $24.95 per year.

Here is the update I received from Picnik:

Holy Hannah, a lot has happened in the seven months since our last email: Picnik has gone big time, with more than 2.3 million visitors, rave reviews everywhere from the Wall Street Journal to the BBC World News, a partnership deal with Flickr (more to come soon!) and the launch of Picnik Premium. Start Picniking! Help spread the word, share this email with a friend!

Look at what Picnik Premium can do: And that’s just a taste! Only $24.95USD a year. That’s, like, 12 quid!

	Since our last email, we’ve been busy with the additions and now Picnik offers 26 effects, 5 frames, a totally new touch-ups section, and nearly 200 fonts and shapes! We’ve added Facebook, Photobucket and Webshots to the list of sites you can open, save and share to, and our integration with Flickr is about to get a whole lot better (stay tuned!). We will of course continue to offer a great set of editing features free, but for full access to the oodles of tools, effects, shapes, fonts and frames, you can sign up for Picnik Premium. It’s only $24.95 a year (that’s less than one latte a month!), and is absolutely the best photo editing value anywhere. We’d also like to thank all our early users, beta testers, bug reporters, criticism senders, fan mailers, Facebook hordes, and word-spreaders who have helped us get to this point. You’re the best a company like ours could have hoped for, and we’re looking forward to continuing to provide you with the very best photo editor out there. Happy Picniking! Team Picnik — Mike, Darrin, Jonathan, Peter, Brian, Justin, Monica, Steve, and Charlie

1932 1st Ave Suite 716

Seattle, WA 98101

blog.picnik.com

www.picnik.com

~Susan Mellott

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My experiment with ‘flittring’ (taking pictures as it happens and uploading to flickr, like twitter but with photos) is working very well. My husband is thrilled to be able to see what we are doing as it happens.

I decided to keep my real time phone camera pictures separate from my Kodak pictures so you can see my digital camera pictures at my Flickr set called Florida 2007 Camera Pics and my real-time pictures on my main flickr mellottrobinson site until I get them moved and then in my set called Florida October 2007.

I also have been taking pictures with my Kodak DX6490 Digital Camera and when I got to my sister’s apartment (she has wifi) I attempted to upload them to Flickr also. But for some reason, every time I pushed the ‘upload’ button, my laptop rebooted.

I tried everything, removed and reinstalled EasyShare software and the camera drivers, tried other software, tried going directly to PC instead of through dock, tried restoring my laptop back to a former backup point, etc. Still, every time I tried to upload, my PC rebooted. Very Frustrating!

So today I got on the Kodak website and did Instant Chat with a rep to troubleshoot it. They wanted me to remove and reinstall the EasyShare software but I’d already done that. So they said to remove the EasyShare software and disconnect the camera which I did. Then I plugged the camera back in and turned it on and it asked me what software I wanted to use to upload the pictures. I picked Microsoft Photo and Scanner upload software and it worked like a charm! Yay!

They wanted me to reinstall Kodak EasyShare software version 6.0 (it was on 6.4) but I said I’d wait until vacation was over until I try that. But if your computer reboots when you try to upload to EasyShare, either uninstall it and try again, or try Version 6.0.

~Susan Mellott

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I have just gone on vacation for 10 days in Florida visiting my sister and my mom. So I thought I would try an experiment where I would do online updates like twitter, only using photos in Flickr.

Now, if I had a fancy phone I could do it through the internet, but I don’t (if you can get to the internet, you can use mobile flickr website).

But I am still emailing pictures from my phone. I found some instructions here on flickr and wasn’t sure if I could do it but it was just a matter of getting an email address for my account (which I can view or edit through my account page on Flickr and then the email tab). Then I just take a picture on my phone camera and email it to my flickr email which posts it right on Flickr. My phone is old but it still have a ’send pix message’ which makes it especially easy and I saved the email address in my phone’s phonebook so I can just pick it when I want to email.

I can also add a message (my phone text messaging skills are poor to say the least, but I can do it - at least if I have my reading glasses on ). And you can set it in Flickr to add certain tags to any email pictures. You can also use tag keywords in your message but I try to minimize my texting through my phone so I just set up some defaults on Flickr.

It is surprisingly easy and fun. The one thing it does not do is have a way to send your emailed pictures to a set, but I just move them there when I get on the computer next.

This is my true “flittr” experiment since it is real time updating. You can go to my Flickr account to see my pictures and see it being updated.

And I will be taking pictures with my Kodak digital camera, my palm pilot and my web cam and posting them to my flickr account at mellottrobinson. I’ll put them in a set called Florida October 2007.

I’m not sure what access I will have to wifi/internet (my sister has wifi but it is locked and she isn’t sure she remembers the password) but I will do the best I can to post my digital pictures as my vacation progresses. The phone pictures are easy!

My husband didn’t come with me so it will be a good way for him to see what all I am doing and seeing.

I have always thought that there needed to be a way to “flittr” since I use twitter and flickr both regularly and combining the two seems like a great idea.

So keep an eye on my Florida October 2007 set and you can see my vacation as it unfolds (it is probably not that interesting but if you do it, it would be interesting to you and your family and friends) and maybe it will spark an interest in you to do the same.

~Susan Mellott

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Thanks to a tweet on twitter (unfortunately I can’t seem to go back and look at all older posts from everyone I follow so I can’t give them credit), I found out about a great new online tool for photo editing called Picnik. Picnik is a free online tool that allows you to edit your online pictures from Flickr, Picasso Web Albums, facebook or photobucket. Or you can upload a picture from your computer, edit it and save it to any of the above.

It has auto-fix, rotate, crop, resize, exposure (including advanced setting like shadows, contrast, highlights, histogram, brightness and more. Note: these may be premium settings). You can edit the color (saturation and temperature) and sharpen it or fix red-eye.

It displays all your pictures from the online photo album of your choice. I use Flickr so I could see all my pictures, or I could see all the pictures in each set. It also shows an “order by” dropdown and a search text but neither of these worked for me. Maybe it depends on the online photo place you are reading from.

You can select a picture and edit, delete, email, rename, save to or open the flickr page. When you rename, you can type the new name right there and it will rename it on flickr. You can also search for photos on Yahoo or flickr or grab a picture from your web cam.

They also have premium features that can be used for free this week (being the week of 9/25 I guess, although I checked today, 10/3 and they are still usable for free and at the bottom it says free for this week so I guess through fridayish). They will then cost $24.95 per year.

Update: As of Oct 16, the premium features are still free.

Some of their premium features are on the ‘Create’ tab, which includes free effects like black and white, sepia, boost, soften, vignette, matte, and the premium effects: nightvision, infrared film, lomo-ish, holga-ish, HDR-ish, cinemascope, focal b&w, soften or pixelate, pencil sketch, doodle (write/draw on it), gooify (drag bits arounds) and pixelate.

I really liked the focal effects, which focus on a certain area (you can change the size and move it around) and highlight that area. Here is a picture of my dog, Koshi that I messed around with. Nothing special but you can sort of get the idea.

Here is their release news from 9/25/2007:

Picnik Release 28 / v1.0! (September 25)

“Picnik has officially launched! Today is the day we take our beta banner down and throw it on the ceremonial bonfire. We’re also introducing our Premium Feature Stream which will be available for the super-affordable price of $24.95 for a whole year. This gets you get complete access to special edit tools, effects, shapes, fonts, and a whole bunch more just around the corner. To celebrate, Picnik Premium is free and open for everyone to preview this week! There’s also a ton of new features, so here’s what’s new:

Photobucket Support: Our mission of connecting Picnik to anywhere your photos might be continues and today we add Photobucket to the list of major photo sharing sites like Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, and Facebook, which you can get photos from or save your photos to!

Effect Painting: Many of you have asked to apply an effect to precise areas of a photo. Now you can with Effect Painting! Choose a Black and White, Sepia, Boost, Soften, Tint, or Pixelate effect and click the new Paint Brush button. You can brush in the original through the effect or check the Reverse effect box to do it backwards: paint in the effect just where you want it.

New Effects: Lots of these! There’s Holga-ish, Night Vision, CinemaScope, Invert, Cross Process, Focal Pixelate, Pencil Sketch, and Pixelate, all under the newly organized Effects section in Create. In fact, the whole Create section has been reorganized, with three new sections…

Shape Tool: Add shapes, symbols, speech bubbles, hearts, arrows, paw prints and the odd spaceship to your photo. You can choose your color, spin it around, make it as big as you want to shape up that shot!

Touch-Ups Tool: Whiten teeth or remove blemishes with these tools. Put your best face forward!

New Frames: We’ve moved Frames to their own section, and have added Museum Matte and Polaroid to the ranks of Border, Rounded Edges, and Drop Shadow.

Stay tuned as we open the floodgates on our Picnik Premium Feature Stream!”

So go check it out and if you hurry, you can try the premium features for free too! At least you could make a couple of cool pictures while it is free.

~Susan Mellott

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Flickr, the online photo gallery is THE web 2.0 tool for putting your photos online. Many people use it and it seems that most pictures you find online are stored on Flickr. There are a few other online galleries such as Shutterfly and kodakgallery (that I used because I have a digital Kodak camera that interfaces with the Kodak Gallery).

And since I’ve used Kodak Gallery mostly, I have just recently started uploading some pictures to Flickr. And I just ran into a limitation of Flickr. Did you know that after you’ve uploaded more than 200 pictures, only the latest 200 pictures will show unless you upgrade to a paid Flickr account? All the pictures will be available if you upload (they don’t go away if you upload more than 200) but you can’t see them until you upgrade. It is cheap, $25/year, but 200 pictures are not many pictures so if you use Flickr much at all, you’ll need to pay for it. And clearly, most of the accounts I look at on Flickr has upgraded since they have more than 200 pictures.

I’m sure I will upgrade, but I just didn’t know that except for just trying it out, I am going to HAVE to upgrade in order to use it.

I have many, many pictures on Kodak Gallery that I want to transfer over (and that is another problem since they don’t make it easy in Kodak Gallery to bulk transfer pictures). But actually, Kodak Gallery also requires that you “pay” for it. It doesn’t have a set charge, but requires that you purchase something from them once a year. Last year we made calendars for our family for Christmas using our pictures and that took care of that requirement. Kodak Gallery is great for that, you can easily create calendars, photo mugs, note cards and all sorts of items from your pictures.

But Flickr is rapidly becoming the standard in online photo galleries and is the tool that most of the cool mashups use for their picture displays. There are all kinds of mashups that other people have created using Flickr and Sean has been experimenting with Flickr hacks from a cool book he got on how to create them. I highly recommend this book if you are interested in exploring this.

Here is a post about mashups using Flickr by Coverpop. It is one of the most amazing Flickr mashups I’ve seen. You have to check these out!

And while you are at it, check out the nice Flickr plugin for Wordpress.org blogs. You can see it in my right sidebar on this blog.

Well, I guess I got off on a tangent but the bottom line is, be aware that if you are interested in using Flickr, you will want to pay the $25 a year in order to really use it.

~Susan Mellott

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I ran across these and they blew my mind! It is called coverpop and it is a website created by Jim Bumgardner, of KrazyDad.com, to house his experimental coverpop project. Per his FAQ page: ”
A coverpop can be a unique work of art, a software toy, or a fun way to shop for stuff.

Each coverpop is an interactive mosaic, made of tiny images, such as magazine covers. These are called “micro thumbnails”. As you drag the mouse over each micro thumbnail, it pops up to a full-sized thumbnail image, and provides some information about the item. For some coverpops, you can click again to produce either a full-sized image, or to go to another website to learn more information about the item.

Some coverpops arrange the images by time, by price, or color. Other coverpops arrange the images into a photomosaic.”

If you go to main coverpop site , you will see a random choice of oneof his coverpop mosaics. You can choose from the list on the right side to see specific ones. He creates mashups using flickr, youtube, amazon and other web 2.0 apps to create really amazing mosaics that you can spend endless time browsing and playing with.

He has a set of youtube video mosaics too. And just plain mosaics that are really interesting. Here is a description of how it works and here is a brief description from that page:

“Data for each coverpop is prepared using Perl and the ImageMagick library. Space-filling is implemented (with visual feedback) using Processing (p5). The interface itself is presented in Flash/Actionscript within a PHP webpage.

I download information about all the covers using various means. I use Amazon Web Services for the Amazon-powered coverpops, and I screen-scrape websites, such as the Visco archive for the Science Fiction coverpop. This is done using a Perl program. Then I download all the thumbnails (again with Perl), and analyse them for color, using ImageMagick to reduce each image to 1×1 and recording the color of the remaining pixel.”

You can also generate banners to put on your website with various mosaics like Harry Potter on Amazon or Time’s Top 100 Novels. These are linked to amazon and you receive credit when someone buys through your site except he receives the credit every 6 times or so. I created one just to try it out (you can generate the code from his site) and put it on the bottom of my Goggle Blogger blog Along the Path to 2.0. It is at the bottom of the blog. Go take a look at it! Unfortunately I can’t put it on my Wordpress blog yet since it is hosted by Wordpress.com. I hope to correct that soon!

To learn about new coverpop or just to find out more, you can go to his blog. He has a lot more interesting things on there.

He has also co-authored a book called Flickr Hacks - Tips and Tools for Sharing Photos Online that talks about the flickr .APIs and how to do some of these things and sounds VERY interesting.

Check it out! But don’t do it until you have some time to spend because you definitely will.

~Susan Mellott

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I imagine most of you know who Wil Wheaton is. He is an actor who played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Actually, he has done a lot more than that, but that is mainly how I know of him.

But what makes him interesting is his love and knowledge of technology and his leading edge use of Web 2.0 tools. Here is the wikipedia entry that talks about him and what he has done.

From wikipedia: “After leaving Star Trek, Wheaton quit acting altogether. He moved to Topeka, Kansas to work as a programmer for Newtek, where he helped develop the Video Toaster 4000.” (I assume they meant he temporarily quit acting)

Wil was a very early adopter of blogging, creating his site wilwheaton.net (see the wikipedia article on his blog) which is currently being updated (since about last June) and is replaced for now by his blog WWdN: In Exile - Wil Wheaton’s not-so-temporary blog. Per the wikipedia article on his blog: “Rather than just a fan forum, it was a place where people could gather to talk about various subjects including movies, music, books, religion, politics, gaming, geocaching, and miscellaneous topics; the original emphasis was on topics of interest to Wil Wheaton and not the man himself.” He has entries on his blog dating back to July 2001.

Wil also has written 3 books, and most of the entries are extended versions of his online blog entries. (Take note, bloggers, this is not a bad idea if you have a following).

Also from wikipedia: “In late September of 2006, Wheaton began hosting a Revision3 syndicated video podcast called InDigital along with Jessica Corbin and veteran host Hahn Choi. ” Of note: Wil found an error on the wikipedia entry for himself and asked on slashdot for someone to correct it.

Wil also twitters regularly and has just recently twittered on the Comic-Con he attended. Interestingly, he is having a problem at the moment trying to remove people he no longer wishes to follow and is talking about it on twitter. Update: as of about 4 hours ago, he twittered that the problem was a bug in twitter and was fixed by Biz Stone.

Wil also uses flickr and has some very interesting photos. And something I found interesting too that Wil has been doing on buzznet is “What is Wil looking At?” which is sort of a cross between flickring and twittering (flittring?). It looks like he is taking pictures with his phone of whatever he is doing and uploading them. It’s a neat idea and I’m sure at some point, people will be doing that just like they twitter now.

And of course, he checks technorati for links to his blog and has a profile technorati for wilw. Here are some other things of his (from his blog):

 

• My Netscape Submissions (he’s a navigator at Netscape News)
• My delicious bookmarks
• Geek in Review
• blogging.la

And there are quite a few interesting videos of him talking about technology on YouTube. Here is one where Wil talks about Podcasting (answering fan’s question at reading of his book, Just a Geek)

And there is a lot more that he is or has been involved with. The wikipedia article and his blog has more information.

To be honest, although I knew who he was, I’m old enough that I watched the original Star Trek more than I watched The Next Generation. But I think he seems like an interesting person and certainly one who is Web 2.0.

~Susan Mellott

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Last night, the Fort Wayne Allen County Public Library held probably the most outstanding event that I remember at the Library. They recreated Diagon Alley and had so many great things to do and see and have. There was a free wand shop, free candy, tattoos, harry potter glasses and more. You could make and adopt an owl, make a clock, make a card and mail it with a special Harry Potter postmark. There was a costume show and Potions class and a magical astronomy show. You could have your picture taken with Harry Potter and Professor Dumbledore at the headmaster’s table and in the Flying Car. There was a magic show, games, fortunetellers, and so much, much more.

I videotaped the crowd when the doors opened at 9pm and I must have taped a steady stream of people going into the library for probably 10 minutes. I hope to have some YouTube videos up soon. I don’t know how many people were there, but I know there were thousands. There will probably be an official estimate soon.

Library staff (including several senior managers) became Harry Potter, Professor Dumbledore, Professor McDonagall, Professor Snape, Hagrid, Moaning Myrtle and Mad Eye Moody. They mingled and interacted with the crowd and signed autographs, posed for pictures and stayed in character beautifully.

Then at midnight, checkout opened and the lucky lottery winners checked out the final Harry Potter book. The smiles on the faces of kids and their parents and everyone who came down was priceless.

It was a wonderful, magical night. Here are my flickr pictures of the event. I hope to have some YouTube videos coming soon.

UPDATE - NEW! Here are flickr pictures of the party from the ACPL.

UPDATE - NEW! Here is a blog entry from blyberg.net about the Darien Public Library Party for the new Harry Potter release.

I hope Fort Wayne appreciates the wonderful asset the city has in the library and how much it does for the community. Go check out the ACPL web site to see some of the activities they offer. Or better yet, visit your local branch and see what is going on. You might be very surprised.

~Susie

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I just set up a Flickr account. Wow, was it easy! I used a piece of of software that I downloaded from Flickr that let me just drag and drop my pictures and mass upload them to Flickr. And adding a Title/Description to each photo was really quick too. I did notice that if I needed to see the larger picture (in order to identify the people in it), when I went back, some of the descriptions appeared to be lost. I retyped them at first until I realized that they were not really lost, it just looked that way. If I went to another page and then back, they appeared correctly.

I have a Kodak digital camera and have used the Kodak online gallery for my albums and sharing them for ages. But Flickr seems to be the one the industry is standardizing on. Another example of Web 2.0. It is not so much that the technology has not been available, it is that no one standard existed and none of the existing technology was open.

So here are my first pictures on my Flickr account.

~Susie

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